You might be asking yourself, "Why so many posts about Klout on SMT?" Are we trying to raise our influence on Klout?
If you've been reading these writings by a variety of authors, you know that there are questions about Klout's algorithm for determining personal online influence and the rationale for Klout's changing that algorithm last month.
For us at SMT, the reason is plain - understanding the influence that individuals can have on the choices and actions of other individuals is somewhat of a Holy Grail for marketers. If an individual is trusted and respected for their decisions and preferences, others are likely to emulate them and take heed of their opinions. SMT covers social marketing and influence metrics are at the core of that practice. The question is, How do you accurately measure one person's influence? Does Klout do that?
Klout CEO Joe Fernandez graciously consented to be interviewed by SMT author Rohn Jay Miller this past week after Rohn publicly questioned the motives of Klout's identifying influencers. By coincidence, at the same time we were publishing Rohn's interview article, I was attending the WOMMA Summit in Las Vegas, where Klout's VP of Platform, Matt Thomson, was part of a panel titled "Debating the Measurement Methods of Online Influence." I captured his self-introduction in the following video.
"We consider ourselves more consumer-focused than business-focused."
"What we try to do is grow the influence pie, overall."
"When you think about channels, we really only worry about social networks - something with an actual reaction in it."
"There's a huge space there, about 400 million [in 2016] influencers, people that create content that has some kind of reaction to it."
"It's about how do we get people to care about being an influencer. So when we think about marketing we think more about how do we reward influencers rather than how do we target influencers."
"From a scoring perspective the philosophy really is that influence is the ability to drive action. "
"The way we think about business is more 'priming the pump' and motivating people to care about their influence."